The woman looked strange, I wasn't sure why she was but she was, strange. It was like she was a robot, cold and hard. Most of the people who had turned up since Dad died had been cold like robots but they weren't like her. I had a feeling she was always like this, not just because Dad was gone but because something in the world made her sad, made her lonely.
The lady had red hair, bright red, almost too red to be her real colour. It was short and curly at the ends and bounced when she walked. She wore a red t-shirt too, almost like a superhero would always wear the same colour when they didn't have their cape. It was like red and her black jeans and jacket were her signature.
When I answered the door the lady had been with a man. A man who wore glasses and had dark hair which was longer and floppier than my Dad had let Francis grow his. The man had said he would wait in the car. The lady smiled at me and said,
"Hello Anna, I'm looking for your mum, Laura." She looked at me in the way relatives do when they know who you are but you don't know them. She knew me, I was sure about that. Nate came to the door then, shoving past me in the silly way that little brothers like to do and smiled at the Lady. The lady's eyes grew big with surprise when she saw my brother and she smiled a big smile at him before she picked him up and held him on her hip.
"And you must be Nathaniel," she said softly. Her voice didn't sound the same as other people, she sounded mostly American but a bit like she came from somewhere else too. There was a rough sound in her voice and she said some words like a whisper from the back of her throat.
"We call him Nate," I explained, "Or sometimes Mom calls him little Nat, when he's being naughty." The lady laughed at that, the way adults do when they find something funny because you said it weird, or said something you're 'too young to understand'.
That's when I heard Mom's footsteps behind me in the corridor heading towards the porch. She got as far as the turn in the corner before she saw the lady at the door. Then something changed in Mom's eyes, she looked angry. She looked angrier than I'd ever seen her before, angrier than when Francis broke the stained glass window of the archer she had loved. Some aunty had paid for it to be put in the dining room and whenever we asked she said it was the man from Dad's stories, the bow and arrow man called Hawkeye.
She launched forwards to the lady, walking straight for her and slapped her across the cheek,
"You bitch!"